118 points Muhammad523 1 hour ago 145 comments

sebmellen 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting that they’ve switched from Persona to Yoti. But what a strange move, with no justification in the article!!

captainbland 1 hour ago | parent

I think getting personal data collection out of the Thielverse is anything but a strange move

varispeed 1 hour ago | parent

oefrha 1 hour ago | parent

It’s quite amazing that in a support doc for normies, they’re literally linking to https://developers.yoti.com/identity-verification/supported-... for supported IDs which opens with

  GET https://api.yoti.com/idverify/v1/supported-documents?includeNonLatin=true
Can’t spend $10 to set up a Claude workflow to sync relevant parts of that page to a first party doc page?

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

What was the justification for using Persona in the first place, if this is so important to know and care about?

umuttalha0 1 hour ago | parent

if claude ask me verification i will drop using it thats it

msavara 1 hour ago | parent

But why?

varispeed 1 hour ago | parent

Since Epstein is gone, the ruling class have become obsessed with collecting photos of children and identifying devices they use. Strange that.

ChrisRR 1 hour ago | parent

Surely this is the opposite? Collecting photos of adults to prove that they can use the service

chrisjj 1 hour ago | parent

Yet this move makes it harder for Anthropic to do that.

chrisjj 1 hour ago | parent

Health.

The health of Anthropic PR when everyone realises the product rots young brains.

nolok 1 hour ago | parent

Dealing with minors has lots of rules and reglementation, for good reason, and usually the justice system of functional countries don't allow you to bypass those with "don't know, didn't ask", because duh of course not.

Using kids data to train? No no. Talking to kids about certain matters (it's still fairly easy to make those model go into drugs or sex or suicide or whatever). No no.

sidcool 1 hour ago | parent

This isn't recent, right?

sikozu 1 hour ago | parent

The date on the help article is May 18, 2026.

edukite 1 hour ago | parent

And TikTok is not available for minors in Poland yet a know 11y old who publish there so yeah, good to pretend

ozlikethewizard 1 hour ago | parent

and murder is illegal but people still get got. "Some people will bypass it" is not a valid reason to not have a rule.

logicchains 1 hour ago | parent

The rule in this case would be more like "you need to show a police history with proof you've never committed murder before you're allowed to enter the supermarket".

techblueberry 1 hour ago | parent

The existence of Epstein island is not reason to make child rape legal.

IslandRebel 57 minutes ago | parent

Equivocating children bypassing social media age gates to child rape is disingenuous and asinine.

The point being made is that these age gates are often easily defeated and is impossible to enforce at scale.

Moreover it allows companies to collect a huge amount of bio-metric data which is difficult for users to remove once it is collected. This data has can be and has been exposed.

matheusmoreira 1 hour ago | parent

Think of the children, won't you?

throwaw12 1 hour ago | parent

Good that we have Chinese models now, we can host anywhere and use as much as we like without age verification.

Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health? If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?

techblueberry 1 hour ago | parent

Is AI bad for mental health?

lol

If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?

No, capitalism must be fed.

matheusmoreira 1 hour ago | parent

Always found this odd too. Somehow it's bad enough to ban children from using it, but not adults.

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

Adults are assumed to be responsible for what they expose themselves to, unlike children.

Mandatory warnings like for tobacco might be in order, however.

matheusmoreira 59 minutes ago | parent

And parents are assumed to be responsible for their own children, not governments or corporations.

layer8 53 minutes ago | parent

I agree about corporations. But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws? They help ensure that the parents aren’t bypassed.

I agree that children should be able to use LLMs under parental supervision.

matheusmoreira 29 minutes ago | parent

> But alcohol and tobacco are generally prohibited from being sold to children; do you disagree with such laws?

Yes, but merely on principle. I think alcohol and tobacco should be straight up banned unconditionally. Society resists this, so they banned them for children instead and called it a day.

I don't accept these ineffectual political concessions. If a thing is bad for children, then it's in all likelihood just as bad for the adults as well. So go all the way and ban it for everybody, not just children. Do it right, don't come up with these half measures that dehumanize children as a side effect.

layer8 20 minutes ago | parent

There is a trade-off between freedom and keeping people safe, and there is an argument for some level of personal responsibility. I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.

I also disagree with the dehumanization argument. Yes, the concrete age limits are a bit arbitrary, and actual maturity depends on the individual and is a spectrum, but regulations necessarily have to come with some level of pigeonholing. The fact that you may have to show your ID when buying alcohol isn’t dehumanizing.

matheusmoreira 11 minutes ago | parent

> I’m glad that I can drink alcohol once in a while without becoming an outlaw, even though I know the effects aren’t harmless.

I'm sure teenagers feel the same way.

eurothings 56 minutes ago | parent

> Mandatory warnings like for tobacco

lol that’ll work

jbs789 51 minutes ago | parent

brains develop with age, generally

matheusmoreira 18 minutes ago | parent

That doesn't nullify a person's ability to decide for themselves.

sdiupIGPWEfh 49 minutes ago | parent

Right, but in this case, exposure is a work requirement, which is a bit different. While an employer isn't going to require tobacco use, work involving asbestos exposure is still a thing (removal perhaps), and an employer knowingly or negligently requiring work activity without both risk disclosure and supply of proper safety equipment would face legal action.

Hence, if mandatory workplace use of AI inflicts harm, then I could imagine things playing out similarly. The damage slowly accumulates, may or may not be noticed in time, becomes difficult to pin down on a past employer, and when you finally realize you need to sue for damages, both the employer responsible and the system are rigged to drag out the process until you're hopefully old and dead before you have a chance to win your case.

...oh.

Muhammad523 48 minutes ago | parent

In fact, a 17-year-old is clueless while a person one year older isn't

Aransentin 1 hour ago | parent

I suspect that the money they get from minors using their services is simply not worth the risk of the negative publicity from the not-unheard-of "Claude told this minor to do <bad thing>!!" articles in the media.

diydsp 1 hour ago | parent

Most likely an identification grab. I haven't seen how anth will enforce the age restriction, but my bet is through linking all of your movements within claude to a govt id.

Abt protecting minors:

19 states still permit teachers to physically hit students. In most states, children as young as 14 or 15 can be legally married (typically girls to older men) with parental consent or a judge's approval.

Multiple states have "religious exemption" laws that shield parents from prosecution for withholding medical care from sick children based on religious beliefs, even in cases where children die. Some states have essentially no requirements for homeschool curriculum, testing, or welfare checks. The US incarcerates children at rates dramatically higher than comparable countries. The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty roughly in half. It was allowed to expire in 2022, and child poverty immediately rebounded.

Millions of American children have inadequate or no healthcare. Medicaid coverage varies wildly by state. States that rejected Medicaid expansion have measurably worse child health outcomes. This is political choice, not necessity. An estimated 500,000+ American children still have elevated blood lead levels, primarily from lead paint in older housing and lead water pipes. Roughly 1.4 million American children experience homelessness in any given year. Almost no meaningful regulation of what can be advertised to minors online.

Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children in 2020. Car crashes are still one of the top three killers of children. schools. Children who live and go to school near freeways have measurably worse health outcomes across their lifetimes: asthma, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular problems in adulthood. Universal free school lunch demonstrably improves child health and academic outcomes. Most states don't have it.

...but official(+) LLM access restriction is our priority? Hahahaha tell me another one.

(+) offline models are as easy as installing ollama.

varun_ch 1 hour ago | parent

> Also, what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_linked_to_chatbots#Suic...

dartharva 1 hour ago | parent

Compliance theater. Now they can get away without having to bother setting guardrails for child safety.

rollypoley 1 hour ago | parent

I think it has more to do with reasonable usage for school age children. NYC got the ball rolling banning AI in the classroom and if Anthropic is smart it will create a classroom version (ie. seperate Claude accounts for minors) with additional guard rails and watermarks to prevent YOLOing homework assignments and projects.

Schools are not equipped to have these discussions bottom-up; Anthropic would make a lot of money if it went top down in conjunction with State governments.

fn-mote 14 minutes ago | parent

I agree with your assertions, but…

AI companies have the same fear of underage users that tobacco companies of underage smokers.

> reasonable usage for school age children

Comical to believe that any of these companies care. They are out to MAKE MONEY. That’s the only believable motivation for what the do.

walrus01 48 minutes ago | parent

If you'd told me 15 years ago that people would be running freely-distributed software originating from research labs in China on computers self-hosted in their own house as an alternative to authoritarian overreach and control by the US in internet-based services, I'd have told you that you were smoking some good reefer.

The irony is that the authoritarian control hasn't gone away in China either, if anything it's even more advanced, the GFW and censorship regime there doesn't show any sign of letting up any time soon. Just today in my BBC news feed:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyvk2djk4o

ACCount37 44 minutes ago | parent

And China controls AI too. It's just that their idea of "safety" is "ideological safety", and their idea of "alignment" is "alignment to the party line".

They're cool with open weight AIs being released. As long as those AIs only ever say good things about CCP, and don't mention certain concentration camps or brutally suppressed protests.

walrus01 41 minutes ago | parent

I don't disagree with you on what is the top-down political priority there, but thankfully the architecture of an open weights model released in .safetensors format allows for 3rd parties to "uncensor" it. There's at least 8 different CN originated models now that after running through heretic and a few other methods will score 0 refusals on this data set of prompts:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/mlabonne/harmful_behaviors

If we were living in a scenario where the open weight models were truly impossible to uncensor I would be significantly more skeptical of them. As a test I have an uncensored copy of qwen 3.8 27B Q8 here that will very happily discuss a myriad of negative things about the CCP.

ACCount37 37 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, it's good that open weights models can have their "filters" busted fairly reliably. Unlike whatever bone Anthropic has to pick with the very idea of biology.

But that's a consequence of how the technology works - not a consequence of China not being authoritarian about AI. They're just authoritarian about AI in different ways.

Not like they dodged the "ID verification" bullshit either. They were way ahead of the western countries there. It's vile - seeing this sad excuse of "think of the children" abused to invade privacy and strip freedoms over and over and over and over again.

throw10920 14 minutes ago | parent

I have basic understanding about how refusal-removal works - find the "no" weights by intentionally generating diverse refusals, and then set those weights to zero.

Is there a similar process for removing not refusals, but misinformation?

walrus01 11 minutes ago | parent

As an end user of this and not a person involved in training models or aligning them, I have only the most rudimentary understanding. But I think that would be a lot harder since the model doesn't fundamentally "know" that information is wrong.

Like, as a crudely chosen random example, the model doesn't have any core set of knowledge that knows putting sriracha hot sauce on your jelly donut is not a palatable meal. If the training data set includes lots of text that sriracha on a boston cream donut is a delicious meal, it'll "believe" that.

Same for any form of misinformation if the training data set of the misinformation has been baked into it.

CrazyStat 30 minutes ago | parent

It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.

walrus01 28 minutes ago | parent

My theoretical self 15 years ago absolutely would have believed the increased authoritarian overreach part (in US/CA/European business and political context). I would not have believed the "multiple ostensibly competing Chinese research labs are giving this away free to run on your own Linux computer, and it's very close to state of the art in capability competing with US-based paid SaaS".

baggachipz 15 minutes ago | parent

Today marks 25 years minus one day since the US really kicked the destruction of privacy into high gear. Soon after, framing this revocation of rights using the name PATRIOT.

herbst 14 minutes ago | parent

A lot of code for Esp devices, Arduino clones and other embed computers is open source coming straight of china. This was also the case 15 years ago.

reaperducer 45 minutes ago | parent

what's the reason banning minors? Is AI bad for mental health?

I simply don't understand how you can ask that question unless you fall into one of these categories:

  1. You live in a place with no access to any news source whatsoever.  No newspapers.  No television.  No radio.  No internet.
  2. You're a child under the age of six.
  3. You're an LLM.
Every day or two there is another story posted on HN about the harmful effects of AI on minors. The level of willful ignorance here makes be thing the answer is #3.

fn-mote 12 minutes ago | parent

> harmful effects of AI on minors

Which is dwarfed by the harmful effects of social media (engagement farming).

Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I think the articles you are talking about haven’t even been interesting enough to click on.

afavour 37 minutes ago | parent

> Is AI bad for mental health?

I think there’s reasonable evidence that when used incorrectly, yes.

> If so, should companies also ban them to prevent burnout of their employees?

It’s not that AI the concept is harmful, it’s using it to diagnose/treat personal problems, mental issues etc. Using it to crunch some data or write some code for you isn’t really the same.

I also think there’s a meaningful difference using AI in education and in the workplace. When you get a writing assignment in a computing class the primary output isn’t the words, it’s you having learned about the topic and how to express yourself. And lots of students are using AI to skip that part entirely.

chrisjj 24 minutes ago | parent

> Is AI bad for mental health?

Yes, if the last few delusional "papers" from Anthropic staff are anything to go by.

planb 1 hour ago | parent

In Germany, this seems to be the case for a long time already. I'm not sure if that's really what happened, but a few months ago my son (who's 17) complained that Claude locked him out when he was discussion school work and mentioning his age in a conversation. I did not see the conversation, but I could verify that his account was indeed banned.

frosty_lemon 31 minutes ago | parent

The article was written in May, so its been months since that has been the case, probably everywhere and not just in Germany.

TutleCpt 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder if part of the reason is that minors are not capable of entering into legally binding agreements. So maybe they're trying to enforce adherence to the terms of service. Dunno.

Claudelmfao 1 hour ago | parent

Do they even know what it is?

Offbrand LLM - I don’t think they care

pr337h4m 1 hour ago | parent

The dehumanization of children and teenagers is getting out of hand.

logicchains 1 hour ago | parent

It's not dehumanization, they just dread a future where kids can learn from 24/7 tutoring from an entity smart enough to solve Millenium problems instead of from some B student who's also teaching 20 other kids at a government propaganda factory.

lirolero 1 hour ago | parent

that's retarded

onion2k 54 minutes ago | parent

The future I dread is one where kids don't learn and just defer everything to AI. That puts so much power into the hands of the AI companies.

jbs789 45 minutes ago | parent

who is "they"? and why is this a desirable outcome exactly?

de-moray 1 hour ago | parent

How does removing access to Clause equate to dehumanizing children?

matheusmoreira 56 minutes ago | parent

It's dehumanizing because it feels like you're an incomplete human with no agency.

When I was a teenager, there was nothing I hated more than obnoxious adults deciding for me what I could or couldn't do. I did literally everything in my power to circumvent them.

azan_ 51 minutes ago | parent

Children absolutely should have less agency than adults.

jbs789 46 minutes ago | parent

we are all incomplete human beings with limited agency. protecting minors us about understanding stages of development.

matheusmoreira 26 minutes ago | parent

I don't want or need governments and corporations to "understand" my development. I'll take care of that myself, thanks.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

Claude Executive: Damn, we hardly know who our users are, can't we just force them to say their full name or ban them?

Claude Product Manager: No, that'll piss people off too much, and sadly we can't just ask for ID either...

Claude Executive: There must be some way we can force people to link their government IDs with our platform so our analytics get better and more accurate?

Claude Product Manager: We could limit the platform to 18+ and use "Age Verification" as the reason for people to hand over IDs, seems other platforms had success with this approach

Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

wangxili1997 1 hour ago | parent

The parody is funny, but in reality, it's almost certainly the reverse: the legal department terrified of regulatory exposure, not marketing looking for IDs.

Laws like COPPA in the US, the UK Age Appropriate Design Code, and EU GDPR carry statutory penalties of over $50,000 per violation if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent.

For an enterprise and developer-focused company like Anthropic, minors contribute negligible revenue while representing 90% of the catastrophic regulatory risk. From a pure cost-benefit perspective, outsourcing age verification to an external vendor and shutting down the under-18 demographic is simply the cheapest way to wipe that liability off their books.

dkersten 42 minutes ago | parent

> if minor data or chat sessions are mishandled without explicit parental consent

I know this isn't what you meant, but I can't help but laugh at the thought of a parent consenting: "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data"

As to your actual point, yes, I assume they are trying to reduce liability, especially if they're gearing up to an IPO.

lukan 34 minutes ago | parent

Since I see so many small kids with FB, Insta and TikTok accounts made for them by their parents - I find "I consent to the mishandling of my child's data" only funny in a very dark way.

stingraycharles 13 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I don’t think Anthropic is particularly interested in tracking individuals in the same way that companies like Facebook and Google are.

embedding-shape 5 minutes ago | parent

I understand giving the benefit of the doubt to individual humans, we're all trying to do our best given our circumstances and contexts.

But for the life of me I'll never understand why people extend this very human idea to faceless for-profit companies that time and time make it evident only one thing matters to them, money. If it can make them more money, they'll do it that way.

cyanydeez 57 minutes ago | parent

none of this is about knowing their customer; I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything they're not getting by finger printing your browser and sharing that fingerprint with an ad network.

This is about reducing liability and making everyone else responsible for their inability to manage their community.

embedding-shape 56 minutes ago | parent

> I find is bizarre people think knowing a single boolean about 18 years of age provides anything

You're hopelessly naive if you think this is all they get out of it.

azan_ 54 minutes ago | parent

You are naive if you think they can’t infer almost everything about median user already.

duskdozer 47 minutes ago | parent

Why would they need to do ID checks then?

azan_ 18 minutes ago | parent

Liability

embedding-shape 46 minutes ago | parent

They certainly can't infer my full name and address from what I've used Claude for in the past, but if I'm forced to hand over my ID and I do, then they would.

password54321 38 minutes ago | parent

Haven't they reported "anonymous" users before to the police?

fn-mote 28 minutes ago | parent

Can you source this? Seems believable but I haven’t heard it before.

embedding-shape 27 minutes ago | parent

I don't know, how is that relevant to them asking for IDs now and also still not yet knowing my full name and/or address?

password54321 54 minutes ago | parent

>Damn, we hardly know who our users are

No, they know who you are. 1 in 3 already use AI for mental health advice among many other things.

abirch 35 minutes ago | parent

I would say misuse AI for mental health advice. It's already difficult to find good mental health professionals.

fn-mote 33 minutes ago | parent

Those two sentences seem to be a non-sequitor. Unavailability is one reason people would turn to AI. Ease of access is another.

Cthulhu_ 25 minutes ago | parent

Exactly why people turn to AI, which I think is good enough for "casual" mental health advice (the kind people can do themselves by reading self-help books or talking with empathic friends). Arguably it's safer than talking to strangers online because now that they've been doing it for a few years, they will (or should) have plenty of safeguards, unlike people on the internet who can talk out of their ass (like me!) and give bad advice. In theory the LLM will escalate or recommend professional help if they're out of their depth.

nekusar 4 minutes ago | parent

I've yet to find anybody in mental health profession who is "good", aside psychiatrists and their drug prescriptions. And that's only cause of gatekeeping drugs, not because they're good either.

The worst problem with mental health care is that there is no "you're better" metric. There is if your bone breaks and heal. There is for surgery of various things. But mental health seems to follow Parkinson's Law, and expands to the number of sessions available, whether it helps or not. And at X00$/session, yeah gets costly quick.

So if something trained on all psychiatric literature costs $20/month subscription, that's a substitute therapist. Whether it's clinically trained or not.

iamgopal 52 minutes ago | parent

You missed Prompt engineering in betweeen.

Cthulhu_ 27 minutes ago | parent

Age verification is not (should not be) the same as ID verification / storage / etc; the US needs laws similar to EU ones where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18" that they get from a trusted party like a bank.

chrisjj 21 minutes ago | parent

> where companies can only get the minimum required PII. In the case of age verification that's zero, or a boolean value "yes this person is over 18"

This person? There's your PII right there. The ad seller's dream.

paintbox 7 minutes ago | parent

I can't figure out if you're joking or not.

tsukikage 17 minutes ago | parent

It's just like cookie banners: they shouldn't exist, but people's bonuses rely on never admitting that, so here we all are.

petcat 14 minutes ago | parent

Well the EU's own government websites are all polluted with the cookie banners too so it's obvious that they can't even resist collecting visitor tracking data themselves.

The whole thing is pointless.

TZubiri 25 minutes ago | parent

This cynic take only makes sense if you have no children btw, because for you children don't exist, but you as an adult exist, so you only consider the possible impacts this may have on you as an adult.

That the impacts on adults are negligible compared on children is irrelevant, because they are multiplied by 0, since they don't apply to you, so you only consider the infitesimal effect it has on you as an adult.

For any parent with a child, it goes the other way, but with a slightly different mechanic. There is an effect on the adult, but it is so minor compared to the effect on children, that the proportionality causes you to dismiss the minor inconvenience it poses to adults, since you are focusing on the question of what happens to children.

Nothing wrong with being (very) selfish though, just pointing out the dynamic.

jscott0918 21 minutes ago | parent

*parent post edited and elaborated while I was writing my reply

Can you elaborate? I do have children, and I don't view it as any platforms job to police their Internet usage. I appreciate parental controls, but if they have Internet access it's my job to teach them to use services safely and keep an eye on their activities

vova_hn2 15 minutes ago | parent

> And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

I doubt that this statement is true.

hobofan 15 minutes ago | parent

I'd wager it's more due to decision making culpability.

Now, for the next "teen committed suicide after talking to AI therapist" headline, Claude can deflect the blame to the parents for not supervising their child enough.

nprateem 8 minutes ago | parent

> Claude Executive: And we hardly have any users younger than 18 anyway, go for it!

LOL. Yeah kids have loved homework and writing essays since forever

jerpint 1 hour ago | parent

Interesting. Is this their first move towards properly implementing KYC?

At some point you have to consider Anthropic liable if Claude is used for something nefarious and they didn’t even bother to know who was using their product to begin with.

embedding-shape 1 hour ago | parent

Why do companies have to be liable for how their tools are using? I understand if Claude had a template which was "Build a bomb with Claude" or whatever, but generic tools that doesn't nudge you in any particular area, topic or use cases, shouldn't the users of those be liable for how they use those tools instead?

And if we still consider Anthropic should be liable for how users use Claude, even without nudging people in bad directions, should this then apply to more things in society as well?

mbrezu 1 hour ago | parent

Get off my load-bearing lawn!

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

(May)

suchiqwow 35 minutes ago | parent

It’s a paid Anslopic post like the others they post every 30m on this shit website.

Never using Claude just to spite the ad campaign

scronkfinkle 1 hour ago | parent

I once heard someone suggest that this should be on the OS level and I'm slowly coming around to the idea. There should be some kind of OS level flag that can easily broadcast to products that a child is using the device. No ID verification required, the parent is responsible for setting it, and all downstream applications are regulated to respect it, If applicable to the product. This removes the incredibly invasive ID verification, and places responsibility on the people responsible for the minor. Companies like meta then can be sued not for failing to detect children (this is, evidently, not working on any platform trying to enforce this currently), but instead can be judged in a black and white manner (i.e. is the child version of meta too predatory to children?)

walrus01 58 minutes ago | parent

Building this functionality into an operating system is an extremely slippery slope to even further centralized corporate and government authoritarian control of people doing what they want with the personal computing devices that they own and possess.

scronkfinkle 55 minutes ago | parent

I think you may be misunderstanding a bit. There's no forced verification. It'd be more of an RFC that gives parents the ability to communicate their underage child is using the device without revealing or verifying any further information. Or do you suspect that giving any ground will cause the ID verification and centralized behavior?

walrus01 53 minutes ago | parent

I suspect that communicating a flag value of boolean true/false that "this computer is in use by a minor" from the operating system (via browser or app) to a remote SaaS service like something run by Anthropic will be seen as insufficient by the SaaS, so they'll necessitate ID-scan/live-selfie verification anyways.

Meanwhile, the age flag in the operating system will be used for other forms of authoritarian control. It will have actually accomplished nothing other than limiting peoples' fundamental civil liberties.

scronkfinkle 38 minutes ago | parent

That's a valid take. The issue I'm wrestling with is the inevitable attempts to point a finger at who is responsible when bad things happen. If you claim it is on the tech companies to know if a child is online, then they will take the safest path for them by forcing ID verification in independent adhoc manners. This is what we are seeing now, and to me this is the worst situation. If you shift the responsibility more to the parents (this child was using a device that didn't send the `PARENT_CONTROL` flag, therefore we assumed they were an adult) it's a completely different conversation. Furthermore, if something happens to a child AND it's obvious from traffic logs that the platform willingly knew a child was being talked to, then that is also a completely different situation than the first.

Leaving it all completely deregulated and/or letting platforms implement it themselves to varying levels of success and personal invasion feels like the worst option to me.

hgoel 48 minutes ago | parent

I think the concern is a forced bit of functionality in all operating systems. It would quickly lead to a "and you need a license to sell your device so we can check that it can't bypass mandatory chuld-safety guards". Just like how some politicians are proposing mandatory licensing for releasing any AI model.

rokkamokka 58 minutes ago | parent

That's very reasonable but doesn't help build the surveillance society sadly and therefore will not be legislated

eagerpace 56 minutes ago | parent

I think the appeal here for parents is it’s a single point to configure. It’s not perfect, but perhaps better to configure one device than every account individually. I’m game for it.

nixpulvis 51 minutes ago | parent

I firmly believe that tech companies being responsible for parenting our children is a deeply misguided response to a failing society and overworked parenting generations.

I benefitted greatly from early access to computers and the full scale of their capabilities. It was a constant issue in my family limiting screen time, and who knows what the exact rules should be for everyone. For me it was a dynamic ruleset I was actively involved in the development of.

I could make compelling arguments to my Mom, that will not be the case with Meta, or Apple, or Anthropic.

Accepting "OS level" age validation is surrendering to a system meant to protect the industry, not our kids future. And while there are serious conversations we should be having about how to control technology use, it should be about parental controls and sane defaults, not age validations and legally restricted access by providers.

I hate how even the most progressive-minded people on most fronts are falling into this trap because big tech has failed them and they are angry at it all.

hgoel 35 minutes ago | parent

Having had a similar upbringing, I strongly agree. I have a hard time not lashing out at people that fall into this trap given how important that early access to computers ended up being to achieving my dreams.

an0malous 50 minutes ago | parent

Was that someone Mark Zuckerberg?

skybrian 39 minutes ago | parent

This is almost right, but it shouldn’t be “is a child using the device?” It should be “is this a child-locked device?”

There should be a children’s Internet, just like there are children’s libraries, and child-locked devices should give access to it. Adults should be able to use the children’s Internet to see what’s there and children should be able to use the adult Internet when supervised by parents and teachers.

Technically, the only thing cooperating websites need is an http header indicating that the client is a child-locked device. Websites can disallow creating accounts or logging in from child-locked devices when they’re only appropriate for adults. There can be laws prohibiting advertising on the children’s Internet, etc, and legit websites will have to follow them. At no point does a website need to know a child’s age or anything else about them. Vendors selling devices are responsible for not selling unrestricted devices to children, but that’s easier than making every website do it.

Since the Internet is still a dangerous place, for non-cooperating websites, child-locked devices do still need the usual whitelists and/or blacklists.

woodrowbarlow 26 minutes ago | parent

100% agree, and no OS should be forced to implement this "child-locked" signal. the existence of OSs that do implement it should be enough (if you want to lock your child's device, use a lockable OS).

pendenthistory 1 hour ago | parent

Seems like a terrible thing to cut off young creators who use this technology productively.

onion2k 56 minutes ago | parent

No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.

antirez 59 minutes ago | parent

Anthropic is incredibly good at avoiding all the useless AI risks, while not doing anything serious about the real risks (that is: uncontrolled growth). I'm as pro-AI as I think that eventually it will remove suffering from humans, and will allow us to prosper more and help us with tons of problems we created. However the problem is not job loss or minors using AI (minors are fucked because of cell phones and social networks), the problem is avoiding extinction. For this position I was accused of AI psychosis multiple times, but I'm in good company (Hinton, for instance), so I bet some comment that trivializes this issue will surely reply to this one, but at this point it is important to see what everyone really believes. Anthropic only touches the surface of AI security, consistently.

YCHNPopcorn 4 minutes ago | parent

Literal retard, do not reproduce

sdcfgy 59 minutes ago | parent

What will our outsourcers use now?

klausa 53 minutes ago | parent

> May 19, 2026

drchaim 51 minutes ago | parent

the same way social networks are not available for < 13

AnslopicH8 50 minutes ago | parent

Anyone else sick of these Claude articles???

We get it. Anslopic the “me too” company has a “me too” LLM.

Do you have to ram this shit down our throats everyday!???

Fucking hell. Enough of god damn CLAUDE.

Stop the hourly Anslopic ads for fucks sake!!!!

Thanks

hnsucksnow2 49 minutes ago | parent

Yeah it’s out of control

le-mark 49 minutes ago | parent

This should have “May 2026” in the title. I don’t recall discussion at the time but surely there was a lot?

whazor 48 minutes ago | parent

I can understand the concerns but at the same time it feels weird to deny young people the ability to make their ideas reality. I got proper internet access when I was 12 and that is how I taught myself how to program.

duskdozer 36 minutes ago | parent

And children will still have access to the internet and resources to teach themselves how to program.

tantalor 46 minutes ago | parent

This is from May of this year?

idiotsecant 45 minutes ago | parent

I barely am using my Claude subscription anymore anyhow. If they make me ID for it I'll simply cancel and use an open model.

jbs789 43 minutes ago | parent

This is dated May 2026...

soltanov 43 minutes ago | parent

Everyone shares their all kinds of data with ai companies. Privacy is dead anyway

llm_nerd 32 minutes ago | parent

No longer? That's an editorialized title, and it's super weird because this very article is from May, and this started back in April, and has been discussed numerous times on here.

e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47775633

Tsarp 29 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes, the usual drop down where we need to confirm we are above 18.

jeroenhd 29 minutes ago | parent

"May 18, 2026" is right there next to the title. Nothing changed.

thrownaway561 26 minutes ago | parent

DeepSeek is the BEST model for the money. Why people still waste money on Claude is beyond me.

b112 13 minutes ago | parent

Since May?

dofm 7 minutes ago | parent

Well they can generally void contracts at will and they can't have credit cards.

I reckon this will have been informed at least in part by a billing complaint somewhat like those "my kid bankrupted me playing games from the App Store" stories.